David Huang

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Lope

I just finished watching this.  Wow!  Those are some amazing and beautiful time lapse images!  Lots of good inspiring information.  It certainly helps support the idea that life on the planet can survive human folly if it needs to.  Though also that mycelium is a whole other realm we are only just beginning to explore and understand which we can work with to help ensure we do remain here.  

It does inspire me to start doing more with mushrooms.  I really need to try growing some of the edible varieties.  This year at the local farmers market there is one fellow who sells mushrooms, oyster, shitake, and a few others.  I often get there just as the market is closing do to how my schedule works that day.  I will buy some when I can, but so often he is completely sold out by the end of the market.  Not really a surprise since his prices are actually slightly less than most grocery stores and the quality is so much higher.  In the movie one of the people noted that fresh harvested mushrooms were so much better than what is usually found in stores.  I have to agree based on this experience with the farmers market.

Understanding how mycelium connects everything and helps share nutrients and information also reinforces why tilling soil can be so damaging.  It's not that the fungi won't recover and rebuild the connections.  It just takes time to do so.

Good movie.  I can think of a couple people I should share this with who would really enjoy and get something from it.

Personally I'm fine with giving foodrevolution.org my email address to see the movie, but then they already have it since I've been following their work for years already.  I've found it to be a quality organization.  In general they are oriented around whole food plant based health and eating, but I don't feel like they are militant that everyone must act like they do.

Edited to add that with the Food Revolution you can always unsubscribe from emails with no problems.

Wand

I just finished watching this for our first Permies Movie Night.  That looks like it would be a very cool place to explore.  I was struck by the attitudes toward the gorse as invasive, and how the fellow in the movie suggested it's role was that of a nurse plant helping to transform grassland into forest.  It made me think of a plant that grows around me, autumn olive or autumn berry, that most here view as an evil invasive.  Like the gorse it too can take over, esp. in open, degraded land.  Also like the gorse it is a nitrogen fixer.  While I don't know for sure, I suspect the autumn olive if left alone would probably help create an ecosystem to nurse other later succession trees that would eventually grow taller and shade out the autumn olive.  I say this because while I see it a lot in open fields and edge zones I don't really ever see it in forests.

I also enjoyed how the fellow doesn't have a cell phone!  A man after my own heart.  Personally I wish I could get rid of my land line too.

Lone

greg mosser wrote:was the greener one on the left the 2nd batch, the one that dried faster? i love this idea, even though i’ve never really had any issues using even huge amounts of scapes.

Yup, you guessed correctly!  The greener batch is the one that dried faster because it was ground up first.

So I tried something different this year with my bounty of garlic scapes.  As Jerry and Greg just noted it is not uncommon for them to end up being rather fibrous instead of nice and tender.  Others in this thread had talked about drying them and making a "garlic powder".  I decided to do that with most of mine, including all the tough bits.

On my first attempt I just cut them into shorter sections to fit more easily in my electric dehydrator (powered by solar panels).  I had them drying non-stop for days but they still ended up something a bit less than crispy, more like leathery.  I thought maybe that's just what the results will be for garlic scapes and tossed them in the blender to "powder" up.  My VitaMix did grind them up, but it still had plenty of fiber lengths in there.  I just had a suspicion they could dry more so I spread them out on my trays for drying fruit leather or such stuff and put them back in the dehydrator.  A day or so later they were super dry and crispy.  I tossed it back in the blender and they powdered right up nicely!

My conclusion was that the garlic scapes naturally resist drying as they are.  So with a second batch I first tossed them while fresh in the blender to be ground up and thrashed about, shredding and ripping them into pieces.  As before I spread the resulting mash out on the fruit leather trays and put them in the dehydrator.  This time they were in a couple days before I actually checked them and found them to be perfectly dry.  Maybe they got there in just a day?  I don't know.  I'll have to pay more attention the next time I do them.  Anyway, after drying the second batch went into the blender and became a beautiful garlic scape powder.  I think this is going to be how I process the tougher, more fibrous scapes in the future since that all becomes irrelevant when ground into powder!  (As a significant side note, I've started doing this with other abundant, edible, but potentially fibrous plants growing on my homestead.  Wild carrot greens powder works great too!)